e bat, with three men on
base, two runs needed to win the championship and twenty thousand
shrieking people trying to break his nerve.

"I will go as far as you like," said Roddy.

* * * * *

Porto Cabello is laid out within the four boundaries of a square.
The boundary on the east and the boundary on the north of the square
meet at a point that juts into the harbor. The wharves and the
custom-house, looking toward the promontory on which stands the
fortress prison, form the eastern side of the square, and along the
northern edge are the Aquatic Club, with its veranda over the water,
the hotel, with its bath-rooms underneath the water, and farther along
the harbor front houses set in gardens. As his work was in the harbor,
Roddy had rented one of these houses. It was discreetly hidden by
mango-trees and palmetto, and in the rear of the garden, steps cut in
the living rock led down into the water. In a semicircle beyond these
steps was a fence of bamboo stout enough to protect a bather from the
harbor sharks and to serve as a breakwater for the launch.

[Illustration: "I hear the call of the White Mice," said Peter de
Peyster.]

"When I rented this house," said Roddy, "I thought I took it because I
could eat mangoes while I was in bathing and up to my ears in water,
which is the only way you can eat a mango and keep your self-respect.
But I see now that Providence sent me here because we can steal away
in the launch without any one knowing it."

"If you can move that launch its own length without the whole town
knowing it," commented Peter, "you will have to chloroform it. It
barks like a machine gun."

"My idea was," explained Roddy, "that we would row to the fortress.
After we get the General on board, the more it sounds like a machine
gun the better."

Since their return in the launch, and during dinner, which had been
served in the tiny _patio_ under the stars, the White Mice had been
discussing ways and means. A hundred plans had been proposed,
criticised, rejected; but by one in the morning, when the candles were
guttering in the harbor breeze and the Scotch whiskey had shrunk
several inches, the conspirators found themselves agreed. They had
decided they could do nothing until they knew in which cell the
General was imprisoned, and especially the position of his window in
that cell that looked out upon the harbor; that, with the aid of the
launch, the rescue must be made f